Helping museum workers collect know-how

Classes show archivists how to handle donations and preservation

March 08, 2011|By Pat Dunnigan, Special to the Tribune

For many of the students in Arielle Weininger's class in museum collection practices, the issues are more than academic.

Part of a certificate program in artifact collection care that began last fall at the University of Chicago's Graham School of General Studies, the class has attracted volunteers, interns and employees from museums and archives across the Chicago area.

Weininger, 36, curator of collections and exhibits at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie, says the goal is to help students "bring a greater level of professionalism to their museums" by studying the legal and institutional policies and practices of other museums and learning to draft and enforce their own.

"Most of these students work at places with one employee or a couple of employees, and the rest are volunteers," she said.

For them, the class is as much a support group as it is an education. The dozens of small museums, cultural centers and archives in the Chicago area must navigate the collection and maintenance of artifacts with the same diligence expected of larger institutions with far more resources.

Mount Prospect Historical Society Executive Director Greg Peerbolte is working his way through the collection of a longtime Cook County commissioner who died in February 2010 and left behind 40 to 50 boxes of everything from parking passes to coffee mugs.

Carl Hansen, the County Board's second longest-serving member, was "a notorious pack rat," Peerbolte said. But the Hansen family's gift of the collection is also a trove of historical riches for the society, he said.

Amy Gwilliam, 56, is a volunteer and board member at Chinatown's Chinese-American Museum of Chicago, where a 2008 fire left the organization starting over.

"Hearing the issues that other small museums have and being able to have an exchange — it's invaluable," Gwilliam said.

Weininger's 14-student class also includes representatives of Chicago's Polish Museum of America, the Ukrainian National Museum of Chicago, the Chicago Japanese American Historical Society and the Japanese American Service Committee archives.

Sarah Pesin, a program coordinator for the Graham School, said the courses grew out a discussion two years ago among professionals from museums and other cultural institutions. With 25 people enrolled, the program's six classes range from temperature, lighting and environmental issues to caring for specific types of artifacts, such as photographs or books.

During a recent class at the U. of C.'s Gleacher Center downtown, students worked in groups to present mission statements and collection policies for four fictitious museums.

The students decided what to accept, what to decline and how to get rid of the things they should have declined but didn't.

It's a difficult job for any institution, but especially fraught at smaller museums, where donors often have a personal connection to the items being offered, Weininger said.

"People show up at the door with boxes full of stuff and want the museum to take all of it because it was important to them," she said. "When you don't have a good collections policy, you end up taking in way too much stuff."

Peerbolte says a box of Hansen's old coffee mugs may indict him on this point.

"People who will work here after me will probably hate me," he said. But Peerbolte said he was facing a tight deadline, knowing that whatever he left behind was headed for a trash bin. "Once it's gone, you can't get it back."

It's the kind of dilemma that brings Weininger's class to life as students work from policies to practices.

Halina Misterka, 48, the sole archivist at the Polish Museum of America, has been working since 2000 to organize the museum's documents and artifacts, which include the records of virtually every Polish-American organization in the country.

"We are sometimes overwhelmed with it," Misterka said. But, she said, the shared knowledge of others in the class has been a big help.

David Tanimura, 27, an assistant archivist at the Japanese American Service Committee on the North Side, can also relate.

"When I saw this program, I jumped," he said.

A full-time graphic designer who works part-time at the archives, Tanimura said the job of documenting and archiving the experiences of the Japanese-American community in Chicago is a fascinating and delicate task, made more critical by the fact that the original community of people who came to the city from World War II internment camps is dying off.

"For a small, community-based archive, the community you serve has a high stake in what you do," Tanimura said. On the other hand, he said, "We don't want to be a big pile of everyone else's basement."